"Seekers Of Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moskowitz Sam)

Like many converts, he is, if anything, a more enthusiastic and outspoken supporter of his faith than most born into it. Yet, no evidence of proselytizing appears in his works. That Catholicism has on occasion expressed reservations concerning psychiatry and that Murray Leinster's stories express a similar attitude doubtless results from the fact that Leinster thinks that way, not that he is pushing religious belief. His is a philosophical dislike of Freudian psychology. There is little probing for motivation. Things happen and man responds to events. In science fiction, where what happens is frequently more important than why it happens or to whom it happens, this tendency has easily been overlooked.
Tanks, a well-constructed short story which appeared in the very first issue of ASTOUNDING STORIES, January, 1930, presents a crucial incident in a war between East and West. The story is noteworthy for the importance it sets on tank warfare. It also indicates the value of helicopters in a battle area. But no reason is given for the war to which the reader is a spectator. While it is evident that wars are planned by men and men have motivations, for all practical purposes Leinster handles warfare as though it were an act of nature.
The Fifth Dimension Catapult (ASTOUNDING STORIES, January, 1931) is a takeoff on the well-worn theme of another world existing in the fourth dimension. Leinster makes the interesting point that since the fourth dimension is time, only our past or future may be found there, so to find another world we must explore a fifth dimension. This story, closely allied to the scientific romances so popular in the old ARGOSY, made good enough ready to justify a sequel, The Fifth Dimension Tube (ASTOUNDING STORIES, January, 1933), in which that other world is more thoroughly explored and the fight is joined against the jungles which are gradually destroying the cities of the intelligent race of that dimension.
One of the few stories in which Leinster takes any pains to bring his villain into focus is the four-part novel, Murder Madness, which ran serially in ASTOUNDING STORIES beginning in May, 1930. A man known as The Master gains control over a large part of South America by introducing into the water supply a drug which regularly needs an antidote to prevent people from going berserk and killing one another. The populace becomes dependent upon the antidote for their sanity, just as diabetics depend on insulin to maintain a normal life. The Master is eventually introduced to the readers as a rather kindly old man whose ultimate purpose is to use his dictatorial powers for the good of mankind.
Heroes are something else again, and Leinster will frequently have two or more in a single story. He is also inclined to attach a nationality to his heroes, so we find in the "Darkness" series the Irish detective Hines and the accented German scientist Schaaf. In The Power Planet (AMAZING STORIES, June, 1931), a prophetic space story of a disk-shaped station in space (not an earth satellite), whose function is to convert the sun's heat into power which it then transmits to Earth, the heroes are a German (Ferdel) who commands the station and will not surrender it to a war rocket from Earth and a Russian Jew (Skeptsky) who sacrifices his life to blow up the threatening vessel.
In Morale (ASTOUNDING STORIES, December, 1931), a ship beaches itself on the New Jersey shore during wartime. It blows up and releases a tank many times larger than a house which wreaks havoc in the countryside with the purpose of diverting thousands of troops away from the front to combat it. The monster tank is eventually destroyed by its own supporting bombing planes through a trick played on its crew. The story is of interest primarily because it suggests LSTs for landing tanks, and air support for land armor.
Far more prophetic was Invasion (ASTOUNDING STORIES, March, 1933), in which the countries of the world are divided into two factions, the United Nations (no less!) and the Com-Pubs (communists). The Russians, who have been leading in space exploration, build a spaceship which is detoured so that it will appear to be a visitor from Mars. This first lures the air fleets of the United Nations to investigate, then traps them between two spheres of force so that the communists can conquer the world at will. Though not a particularly outstanding story, it was nevertheless a chilling projection of future political conditions.
The Racketeer Ray (AMAZING STORIES, February, 1932) belongs with the Darkness series. An electromagnetic beam, so powerful that it can draw anything of metal and even siphon off electrical current, gets into the hands of gangsters and is used for criminal purposes. When the gangsters are eventually tracked down, one of them, learning that the machine's range is infinite, turns it on the moon overhead and disappears into space clinging to the apparatus rather than spend his life in prison.
Bombing from a height of eight miles through the use of an infrared camera is a projection that Leinster made first in Morale and then again in Politics (AMAZING STORIES, June, 1932), in which political chicanery almost causes the sinking of the fleet and the surrender of the United States. Pocket battleships such as Germany used in World War II are introduced, and the aircraft carrier and air power are given some recognition, though it is a battleship with automatic range finders that eventually wins the day.
Leinster's motif of a scientific invention used by gangsters for criminal purposes is repeated in The Sleep Gas, a long novelette in ARGOSY for January 16, 1932. With most writers, a device such as this would bring on simple hack work, but the care with which this story is plotted and the realism with which it is told, combined with a very evident and intimate knowledge of New York City, make this story of the use of a sleep gas for criminal purposes outstanding. Leinster's interest in science has been sustained throughout his writing career and he has always had a home laboratory. As a result, even when he was improvising his science out of blue sky, it was usually convincing.
A powerful foundation for convincing science fiction was derived from Leinster's very real interest in science. At his summer home, "Ardudwy," in Gloucester, Virginia, which he acquired in 1921 and has lived in ever since, he tinkered incessantly in his own laboratory. Strange things, with useful applications, came out of that laboratory. Before World War II he had set up a way of isolating radioactive isotopes utilizing equipment costing but $10. He developed a method of reproducing photographs between wet newspapers on a wooden bench. There were scores of other innovations, but most remarkable was Jenkins Systems, a method for making moving pictures without sets, in which live actors walk into sets made up of projected backgrounds. It is currently being used by CBS and is under license to Fairchild Instruments, New York, which maintains a demonstration studio which can be rented by anyone desiring to make use of the method.
The Earth Shaker, an exciting and very readable three-part novel beginning in ARGOSY for April 15, 1933, adopts another Leinster formula that originated as far back as A Thousand Degrees Below Zero in THRILL BOOK. A scientist discovers a means of manufacturing earthquakes through the use of ultrasonic waves and begins to shake down city after city in an attempt to establish himself as dictator, but he is finally tracked down.
Back in the 1930's, ARGOSY was a leader in pulp magazines and regular contributors were generally of superior writing ability, on a level halfway between the pulp and the slick magazines. Murray Leinster, under his own name Will Jenkins, was already appearing in SATURDAY EVENING POST, COLLIERS, LIBERTY, AMERICAN, and other mass-readership magazines of the period. He was in every sense a cut above the markets in which his science fiction appeared. His short story, A Very Nice Family, won a $1,000 first prize in LIBERTY at that time and was subsequently reprinted some twenty-five times. Hard-cover book and motion picture sales were also accumulating. Up to 1965, of over 1,300 stories, one-third would be sold to the big-time slicks and a dozen would become pictures.
However, guaranteed assignments from science-fiction magazines were generally filled, even at the relatively low rates that market paid, because they took care of periods when Leinster had nothing else on the fire and because he had always remained an avid fan.
When F. Orlin Tremaine assumed editorship of ASTOUNDING STORIES in 1933, he inaugurated a policy of "thought variants," stories with daring new ideas, to make a bid for leadership in the field. An old friend of Leinster, he approached him for stories under the Leinster name. Of all authors in the field, Leinster seemed a poor choice, for while strong on gadgets he appeared limited in plot variations. At that very moment he was putting the final touches on a short novel for ARGOSY, War of the Purple Gas, in which New Asia was again conquering the United States, this time with a device that disintegrated metals. It seemed unlikely that new ideas could be ground from such grain.
His first contribution to Tremaine, Beyond the Sphinx's Cave, in the November, 1933, ASTOUNDING STORIES, tells of the discovery of the mythological creatures of Greece in caves beneath that country. It suggests that radioactive mutation of human beings is one of the answers to their existence; the Gorgon's head becomes an artistically wrought projector of a paralysis ray.
This was merely a test run. The story that followed, Sideways in Time (ASTOUNDING STORIES, June, 1934), introduces an idea on time travel which had never previously been used. It suggests that the past, future, and present travel not in a straight line, but like a curving river, a concept similar to J. W. Dunne's theories. Not only are events of the actual past, present, and future blended, but also time tracks that never actually happened. As the result of a fault in time, segments of all of these elements superimpose simultaneously, creating a world where Roman Legions still march, the South has won the Civil War, Chinese have settled America, prehistoric monsters roam mindlessly, and Indians raid towns, all in one kaleidoscopic melange. The unfortunate thing was that Leinster took only 20,000 words instead of 100,000 to expound his hypothesis. The result was an outline more than a story, from which other authors reaped the benefits.
Sideways in Time proved no one-shot success. Altering his old formula of letting a remarkable invention fall into the hands of a criminal so as to let the emphasis rest on extrapolation rather than on detection, Leinster's The Mole Pirate in the November, 1934, ASTOUNDING STORIES easily ranks among the half-dozen best science-fiction stories he has produced. The seldom-used concept of a machine whose atomic structure can be altered so that it can serve as an underground ship, passing wraithlike through all solid substances, offered fascinating and highly dramatic sequences in an immensely satisfying conjecture.
Proxima Centauri, which ran only a few months later, was as remarkable an effort. Readers of the March, 1935, ASTOUNDING STORIES were treated to one of the earliest stories of an interstellar spaceship that is a world in itself, as well as one presenting a civilization of intelligent carnivorous plants, logically thought out and with intimations of their psychology and motivations.
Leinster was not letting his ASTOUNDING efforts distract him, from ARGOSY. The Rollers in the December 29, 1934, issue of that magazine was a dramatic story of a man who creates supertornadoes by temporarily nullifying gravity in limited regions. The Morrison Monument in the August 10, 1935, issue was intended to be the time travel story to end all time travel stories, pointing out that time machines might remain permanently fixed, indestructibly present in the same spot for the entire duration of their journey into time, to be viewed by generation after generation of humans. The Extra-Intelligence in the November 30, 1935, issue was one of Leinster's weaker efforts, however, dealing with the revival of the dead and the efforts of a disembodied superintendence to take over at the time the feat is accomplished.
Much more successful was The Fourth Dimensional Demonstrator, one of the funniest stories ever to appear in science fiction. A machine is built which, by moving back in time, will bring into being a replica of an object placed upon it. First used for duplicating valuables, it accidentally copies fiancees and police officers. This frolic is an example of better science-fiction humor.
Leinster's last science-fiction effort in the thirties was a novel, The Incredible Invasion, a tale more of the variety that he had popularized in ARGOSY, telling of invaders from another dimension who paralyze the entire city of Newark, New Jersey, and loot it until they are stopped. Beginning in ASTOUNDING STORIES for August, 1936, and running for five installments, it belongs in the category of "good fun."
The slant in science fiction began to change. Technical knowledge was downgraded. An entirely new approach was taken, with the stress more heavily on the sociological and psychological impact of future changes than on the scientific advances themselves. Many of the old-time favorites were unable to adjust and were replaced by bright new stars, such as Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, A. E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard. Leinster, identified with an outdated era, did not seem to belong.
Then, in 1942, several short stories by Murray Leinster appeared in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION. Those in the "know" passed these off as fillers made possible by the wartime shortage of writers. Then, Murray Leinster lowered the boom with First Contact. A novelette appearing in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION for May, 1945, it approached from an entirely new angle the idea of earthmen meeting aliens of high technological status. An interstellar Earth ship meets another ship of comparably advanced design in the great vastness between star systems. The crew does not dare ignore the contact, for the alien ship may trail the Earth ship back to Earth, and there is no way to be sure if it constitutes a menace to mankind. The alien ship is in a similar dilemma. The situation is eventually resolved by an exchange of ships so that both groups can benefit from new knowledge without revealing their locations.
This aspect of the problems of meeting another intelligent race had never previously been examined or evaluated. Every top writer in the field stood at attention and saluted. Anthology appearances began to multiply and the story was quickly accepted as one of the great classics of modern science fiction. An entire anthology titled Contact, leading off with Leinster's story, was edited for Paperback Library by Noel Keyes (pen name of David N. Keightley, contributor of fiction to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST) in 1963.
The story penetrated the Iron Curtain and was discussed in the text of The Heart of the Serpent, a novelette by Ivan Yefremov, published in Russia in 1959. Yefremov, a Russian fossil hunter, as well as the author of several science-fiction novels, contended that Leinster's thinking was that of a decadent capitalist and that races advanced enough to have spaceships would be beyond primitive fears of war and violence. From Leinster's attitude he derived his title "Heart of the Serpent," contending through the mouth of one of his characters that "... in the writings of those who sought to defend the old society, proclaiming the inevitability of war and the eternal existence of capitalism, I also see the heart of a poisonous snake."
But, to display how truly harmonious, filled with sweetness and light, a first space meeting between two different intelligent races would actually be, Yefremov postulates a fluorine-breathing species on a fluorine-atmosphere planet; such a race could not conceivably covet anything possessed by earth-men.
The year First Contact was published, ARGOSY, now a slicked-up men's magazine, ran a Murray Leinster two-part short novel. The Murder of the U.S.A. This story, which followed the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was one of the most remarkably accurate short-range expositions ever to appear in science fiction. The United States of the near future is armed with batteries of intercontinental ballistic missiles, propelled by rockets and possessing nuclear warheads. These are situated in bombproof underground bunkers, held in reserve as a war deterrent. Then, one third of the population of the U.S.A. is destroyed by a sneak attack. Since many countries have the capacity to deliver such a blow and the rockets came over the poles, not implicating any one nation, the United States works to find out who is the international "murderer" while the whole world sweats. If the country that sent the bombs tries to follow up its advantage with an invasion, it will immediately expose itself to the retaliatory effect of the hundreds of American nuclear warheads.
The plot had initially been approved by LOOK and a tentative agreement to pay $4,000 for the completed story had been made, but when LOOK saw the final manuscript they refused it. After its appearance in ARGOSY, John W. Campbell convinced Crown Publishers to publish the short novel as a book, but they avoided calling it science fiction and instead issued it in 1946 as a murder mystery!
Leinster's thinking on modern lines proved seminal. With the age of the computer fast moving in, he wrote and had published in the March, 1946, ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (under the Will F. Jenkins byline) a story titled A Logic Named Joe, dealing with the time when a device would be present in every home, linked in with a central Univac-type "tank," which would contain all man's knowledge and would dispense information to subscribers. Naturally, there would be automatic censors. What happens when a faulty machine gets around the normal blocks, and dispenses information ranging from how to murder your wife and not be detected to the easiest way for a bank president to embezzle, makes for a brilliant and probably prophetic story.
When considering the potentialities of computers in its educational film "The living Machine," released in 1962, the National Film Board of Canada Incorporated certain observations from A Logic Named Joe, mentioning it by name.
Symbiosis, a Jenkins story, with the unique concept of an entire nation being infected with a disease to which they had been immunized, but which would kill other human beings with whom they came in contact, was published in COLLIER'S for January 14, 1947.
The Strange Case of John Kingman, ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, (May, 1948), dealing with the discovery of a man who has been locked up in an insane asylum for 162 years—a paranoid alien from another planet—and the attempts to cure him, is a masterpiece of the short story form and has been since widely imitated.
A complete change of pace was The Lonely Planet (THRILLING WONDER STORIES, December, 1949). An entire planet is covered by a single organism, called Alyx, which gradually gams consciousness from its association with men, whose most complex orders it follows blindly. Though it eventually becomes more intelligent than humanity, its motivating drive is companionship. Fearing its powers, mankind futilely attempts to destroy the creature. Its eventually successful efforts to arrive at an accommodation with the human race are touchingly and ingeniously related by Leinster.
Like the alien in The Strange Case of John Kingman, the science-fiction fraternity awoke one day in 1962 to the realization that Will F. Jenkins alias Murray Leinster was an unusual phenomenon. Here was a man who had again and again proved that he was leader, if not master, of the field in all its transformations and nuances. On September 1, 1963, he was Guest of Honor of the 21st World Science Fiction Convention, held at the Statler-Hilton, Washington, D.C. For more than a decade they had called him "The Dean of Science Fiction Writers"; now they had decided to make it official.

4

EDMOND HAMILTON

"The Dean of Science Fiction Writers" is undeniably Murray Leinster, but who is heir apparent? Most certainly it must be Edmond Hamilton, one of the most underestimated (though not unappreciated) writers of science fiction.
Since 1926, not a year has passed that has not seen as many as a score of Hamilton stories appear in the science-fiction and fantasy magazines. Nor is his a fading talent which should be recognized "for auld lang syne." Three recent years running, science-fiction novels of his were Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club selections: The Star of Life (1959), The Haunted Stars (1960), and Battle for the Stars (1961). His short story Requiem (AMAZING STORIES, April, 1962) was, by far, the most acclaimed story of the year in that magazine. Its hymnlike mood is expressed by the spaceship commander, the last man to tread the surface of the earth before it spirals from its orbit into the sun, and culminating in his sense of outrage at the commercial professionalism of the camera crews and commentators on hand to record the mother planet's final plunge. Only slightly less applauded were The Stars, My Brothers (AMAZING STORIES, May, 1962), involving a dramatic choice between sentiment and rationality by a man of the present restored to consciousness in the distant future, and Sunfire! (AMAZING STORIES, September, 1962), where a man's pride is humbled by contact with creatures of living flame. All three stories displayed a refinement of technical skills and a maturity of outlook that added full dimension to Hamilton's long-acknowledged mastery of action and adventure.
Edmond Hamilton made his first appearance as a writer with The Monster-God of Mamurth back in the August, 1926, issue of WEIRD TALES; he has remained constantly on the science-fiction scene ever since.
When Hamilton's first story appeared, science-fiction magazines were only six months old; AMAZING STORIES, April, 1926, was the first. The hotbeds in which good science fiction was nurtured were ARGOSY and WEIRD TALES (which periodicals usually ran at least one, and sometimes as many as six, science-fiction tales an issue).
One of the "greats" of ARGOSY'S fantasy writers was A. Merritt, and his works became literary icons for young Hamilton's worship. Using as his inspiration, Merritt's classic The People of the Pit (ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, January 5, 1918), a masterpiece about a lost city in an Alaskan cave, Hamilton made his first attempt to become a professional writer with a short story, Beyond the Unseen Wall, WEIRD TALES' editor, Farnsworth Wright, rejected it because of an unclear ending, but almost a year later, rewritten as The Desert God, it was accepted by him and appeared under the title The Monster-God of Mamurth.
By a remarkable coincidence, WEIRD TALES ran it in the same issue with the only story Merritt had ever submitted to them, The Woman of the Wood, WEIRD TALES rated its stories according to reader preferences and printed a monthly report on the favorite. As a head-swelling beginner's achievement, Hamilton's story scored second only to Merritt's, beating out even H. P. Lovecraft's contribution that month.
The Monster-God of Mamurth was above average for its period. An explorer in the North African desert discovers a legendary city protected by walls of invisibility. The long-departed inhabitants of that city worshipped a gigantic spiderlike creature, transparent as air, which, it turns out, is still alive and roams through the city's deserted buildings. Some incidents are singularly effective: one in which the hero stands visually unsupported on a 100-foot-high temple stairway; another where he gropes his way along walls and corridors he cannot see, stalked by the monstrous "god"; and, finally, the vivid imagery of his throwing a huge but optically nonexistent building block in the direction of approaching noises to pin down the menace which gradually takes shape as it splatters itself with its own blood in its desperate thrashings to escape.
Even before The Monster-God of Mamurth was published, Hamilton had sold to Wright Across Space, a three-part novel, which began in the immediately following September, 1926, WEIRD TALES. In this novel, the Easter Island statues are found to be images of Martians, still living in a city underground, who are pulling Mars close enough to earth so that overcrowding on the Red Planet can be eased by emigration. The writing and background are absorbing, but the science (reminiscent of Andre Laurie's Conquest of the Moon, 1889, in which that satellite is magnetically drawn down to earth) is embarrassingly crude.
The Metal Giants followed and was illustrated on the cover of the December, 1926, WEIRD TALES. Despite the fact that it used the old Frankenstein theme (an artificial brain turns on its creator and builds tremendous atom-powered robots which devastate cities and gas their inhabitants into extinction), it received three times as many reader votes as its nearest runner-up. Corny but effective, it was later mimeographed in an abbreviated version by Jerome Siegel, correspondent of Hamilton's, for the Swanson Book Co., Washburn, North Dakota, who for many years dispensed the pamphlet as a premium to buyers of Swanson's mail order science fiction.
The Atomic Conquerors (WEIRD TALES, February, 1927) again was first choice of readers; it tells of a war between creatures of the micro-universe (subatomic) and of the macro-universe (of which we are but an atom) with Earth as a battleground. In the following issue, Evolution Island, an imaginative tour de force, about a ray that speeds up evolution on an island and its bizarre effects upon all life forms, including the emergence of intelligent, mobile plants, missed first place by only a few votes. At the age of 23, Hamilton was off to an auspicious writing start.